Sustained

A Bonus Chapter — Cade’s POV

One Year Later

I’d been planning this for three weeks.

Not a grand gesture — I’d learned, over the course of twelve months of loving Easton Mercer, that grand gestures made him twitch. The man who’d once orchestrated every minute of his day in six-minute billable increments didn’t need spectacle. He needed specificity. The kind of attention that proved someone had been watching closely enough to know the difference between what you asked for and what you actually wanted.

The anniversary was the rainstorm. Not the first kiss — that was the wall, which was violent and desperate and half-drunk and not the beginning so much as the detonation. Not the first date — the diner, which was beautiful but accidental. The rainstorm. The night he drove across the bridge at eleven o’clock with his shirt half-unbuttoned and his hands shaking on the wheel and knocked on my door and said I can’t do this and then let me pull him inside and proved that he could.

That was the night he chose me. Everything before was gravity. The rainstorm was the jump.

I closed the shop at four. Sent Torch a text: Don’t call me tonight. He responded with a thumbs-up, which from Knox Delacroix was the emotional equivalent of a twenty-one-gun salute and a handwritten sonnet.

The warehouse was ready. I’d been working on this between builds for the last week — hiding supplies in the shop, smuggling candles upstairs during Easton’s office hours, building the evening the way I built everything: with my hands, by feel, one component at a time.

Pillar candles lined the kitchen island and the bathroom ledge and the loft railing. Not tea lights — Easton’s emergency candles were tea lights, practical and precise, the candles of a man who packed illumination the way other men packed aspirin. These were pillars. Heavy, warm-toned, the kind that threw light in soft pools and made brick walls look like they were breathing. The apartment smelled like cedar and garlic and melting wax.

Chet Baker was on the record player. The trumpet album — Chet Baker Sings — the same vinyl I’d played the first night he came over for carbonara and leaned against my side on the couch and I’d felt the exact moment his body decided to trust mine. That album was sacred now. Our album. The soundtrack to every version of us that had ever existed in these rooms.

On the stove: the carbonara. Our recipe — the one I’d made from memory that first night and hadn’t written down since, because the proportions lived in my hands the way engine specs lived in my hands. The guanciale was crisping. The eggs were tempered. The pasta water was approaching the boil with the steady inevitability of something I’d set in motion and could now only wait for.

And on the bed, in the loft, under the skylight that would show the stars: his leather jacket. The one he’d worn to the compound the day he came back in sneakers — the day he chose, permanently, to stop running. I’d taken it to a leather worker in the club — a prospect named Vera who did custom embroidery and asked no questions — and she’d stitched into the lining, in my handwriting:

First ride’s yours. Always. — C.

The lock turned at six-twelve. The door opened. The sound of shoes being toed off at the threshold — the ritual, the signal, the moment the outside world ended and ours began.

"Something smells incredible," he called from the entryway.

"That’s the candles."

"Something smells incredible and also there’s garlic."

"That’s the carbonara."

A pause. The particular quality of silence that meant Easton Mercer was standing still and looking at something and his brain was processing faster than his mouth could follow. I didn’t turn from the stove. I let him have the moment — the candles, the music, the smell, the full sensory download of a man walking into an evening that had been built for him.

His footsteps crossed the hardwood. His arms came around me from behind — a gesture that had taken three months to become automatic, that had started tentative and become essential, his chest against my back, his face against the side of my neck, his breath warm on my skin.

"Happy anniversary," I said.

"You marked it from the rainstorm."

"The rainstorm was the night you chose me."

His arms tightened. His mouth pressed against my neck — not a kiss, not yet. A placement. The claiming of a specific spot on my body that had been his since the first time he’d put his mouth there and felt me shudder.

"I choose you every day," he said. "The rainstorm just made it official."

We ate at the island. On stools, the way we always ate — hip to hip, our knees touching, the food between us and our hands finding each other between bites. The carbonara was the same as the first night and different from the first night, the way all recurring things are different: layered with context, weighted with history, each bite carrying the memory of every time before.

He told me about a case — a tenant dispute where opposing counsel had cited a repealed statute and Easton’s surgical response had prompted a recess that was, in legal terms, a white flag. His eyes lit when he talked about the law the way mine lit when I talked about engines: with the particular joy of a person operating inside their gift.

I told him about the Shovelhead — a rattle I’d been chasing in the primary drive that turned out to be a loose compensator nut, the kind of problem that sounded simple and required three hours of disassembly to diagnose. He listened with the genuine interest of a man who’d learned to speak motorcycle over the course of a year, who couldn’t rebuild a carburetor but could follow the logic of one, who understood that when I talked about engines, I was talking about the way I loved.

Chet Baker played something slow. The candles threw shadows across the brick, and his face in the warm light was the face I’d memorized — the jaw that unclenched when he came home, the green eyes that went soft in candlelight, the mouth that had been trained to perform and had learned, in this kitchen, in this life, to simply be.

His hand found my thigh under the island. Not moving. Just resting. The weight of his palm on the denim above my knee, the particular pressure of a man who touched me now without calculation — not because he’d overcome his fear, but because the fear had been replaced by something larger.

"I want to show you something," I said.

"The last time you said that, you blindfolded me with a shop rag and drove me to a warehouse."

"This is better."

"Better than a custom-renovated waterfront home with a skylight?"

"Different better. Upstairs better."

His eyebrows rose. The look — the one that was simultaneously attorney and lover, analytical and wanting, the look that did things to my circulatory system that had not diminished in twelve months of daily exposure.

"Lead the way," he said.

The loft was candlelit. The pillars I’d placed along the railing threw gold across the brick, and the skylight was a rectangle of dark sky scattered with stars — October in Charleston, the humidity retreated, the atmosphere clear enough to see forever.

He saw the jacket on the bed. Stopped.

Crossed the loft. Picked it up. Turned it over. Found the lining, and the embroidery, and the words I’d written and Vera had stitched in thread the color of midnight.

First ride’s yours. Always. — C.

The sound he made was quiet and vast. Not a word. A breath that carried everything — the rainstorm, the bridge, the wall, the landing, the parking garage, the three weeks, the choice, the year. All of it compressed into a single exhale that left his body and dissipated into the candlelit air of the home I’d built for us.

His eyes were bright when he looked up. Wet at the edges. The tears that didn’t fall anymore so much as gathered, held in suspension by a man who’d learned that emotion was not a liability but a language, and who spoke it now with the fluency of a native who’d returned to his mother tongue after years of exile.

"Cade." My name in his mouth. Low. Reverent. The way he’d said it the first morning after, tracing my tattoos in the gray light of a bed above a motorcycle shop. "Come here."

I went.

He kissed me and it tasted like wine and carbonara and a year of mornings and the particular, irreducible sweetness of a man kissing the person he chose, every day, with the full awareness of what the choosing cost and the absolute certainty that it was worth it.

His hands went to my shirt. Pulled it over my head. His palms landed on my chest — warm, familiar, mapping the territory he knew by heart and explored anyway, because Easton Mercer approached my body the way he approached case law: with the understanding that mastery required constant study.

I reached for his shirt — the button-down he wore to the office, the collar open, no tie. My fingers worked the buttons the way they’d worked them a hundred times, but tonight I went slower. Each button was a word in a sentence I was constructing with my hands: I remember the first time I did this. I remember how you shook. I remember the way your breath caught when the air hit your skin, and I remember thinking that no one had ever undressed you with attention, and I swore I would, every time, for as long as you’d let me.

The shirt fell. His chest in the candlelight — lean, pale, the body I’d watched transform over a year from a thing he hid to a thing he inhabited. I put my mouth on his sternum. Felt his heartbeat against my lips. Counted the beats the way he counted the seconds of his morning ritual — not from anxiety, but from reverence.

"I have a request," he said.

"Anything."

"I want — tonight, I want to—" He paused. The particular pause of a man who was about to say something he’d been thinking about and that still, even now, even after a year, required a running start. "I want to be in charge."

I pulled back. Looked at him.

His face was flushed — candlelight and want and the specific heat of a man making a demand that overrode a year of established dynamics. His eyes were steady. Not asking. Telling. The voice of a man who’d spent months learning to ask for what he wanted and had graduated, tonight, to the advanced course: taking what he wanted.

"I’ve been thinking about it," he continued, and his voice was dropping into a register I’d heard in courtrooms and depositions and that was now being deployed in our bedroom for a purpose that no law school had prepared him for. "About what it would feel like. To have you — underneath me. To be the one who—"

"Yes."

He blinked. "I didn’t finish."

"You don’t need to finish. Yes." I took his face in my hands — the gesture that had started everything, in his kitchen, a lifetime ago. "Whatever you want. However you want it. The answer is always yes."

Something ignited behind his eyes. Not the desperate fire of the early days — something more controlled. More certain. The fire of a man who knew exactly what he wanted and was about to take it with the same methodical precision he brought to everything.

He pushed me.

Both hands, flat on my chest, firm and deliberate — not the desperate shoves from the night of the wall-kiss but the calculated application of force by a man who understood leverage and was now applying it to a context his law degree hadn’t covered. I stepped back. He stepped forward. The backs of my knees hit the bed.

"Sit," he said.

I sat.

He stood over me. The candlelight was behind him, turning his edges gold, his face in shadow. From below, looking up, I saw a version of Easton I’d never seen — the commanding version, the one who ran courtrooms and dismantled opposing counsel and had once made a federal judge reconsider a ruling with the force of his argument alone. That version, aimed at me.

I was instantly, devastatingly hard.

"Lie back," he said.

I lay back. On our bed, under our skylight, with the stars visible through the glass and the candles throwing gold across the ceiling. I watched him undress — his pants, his belt, the underwear — with the deliberate unhurried pace of a man who understood that anticipation was a form of worship.

He climbed onto the bed. Over me. His knees on either side of my hips, his hands beside my shoulders, his body a framework of lean muscle and candlelight and the particular authority of a man who had found, in the space between surrender and command, the full range of his power.

"You’ve spent a year taking me apart," he said. His voice was quiet, steady, the voice of a closing argument delivered to an audience of one. "Piece by piece. Layer by layer. The suit, the tie, the mask, the coffin. You’ve been patient and dominant and impossibly kind, and you’ve given me—" His voice thickened. He pressed through it. "You’ve given me everything. The bike. The home. The choice. The ability to stand in a room full of people and be myself."

His hand came to my face. Thumb on my cheekbone. My gesture. Given back.

"Tonight, I want to give you something," he said. "I want you to stop building. Stop holding. Stop being the steady one. Let me hold you."

The words hit a place I didn’t know was still vulnerable. The place where Eli lived. The place where every loss I’d ever carried sat in a pile I’d been building around instead of sitting in. The place where a man who built things when he felt them stored the feelings he hadn’t found a structure for.

"Easton—"

"Let go," he said. And his mouth found mine, and the kiss was not a request. It was a verdict. Delivered with the full authority of a man who had spent twenty-nine years learning to be powerless and one year learning to be powerful and who was now, for the first time, deploying that power in service of the man who’d given it to him.

He worked his way down my body. Mouth on my jaw. My neck — the spot below my ear that he’d discovered on a Wednesday night in month three and had been exploiting mercilessly ever since. My collarbone. The scar across my ribs — the knife fight, the old story — where he always paused, always pressed his lips, the bookmark that said I was here, I’ll be back.

My chest. My stomach. The lines of muscle that flexed under his mouth, involuntary, the body responding to the particular stimulus of Easton Mercer’s tongue on my skin with the same urgency it had responded with on the first night and the hundredth night and every night between.

His mouth reached my hip. The V of muscle. The tattoo — dark vines climbing down from my torso, thorns and dead roses and the botanical chaos that covered half my body. He traced a vine with his tongue — slow, deliberate, the attention to detail of a man who read everything carefully and missed nothing — and I made a sound that was not a word and was not quiet and that bounced off the brick walls of our loft with an enthusiasm the architect had not anticipated.

"There it is," he said against my skin. My words. From our first night. Given back to me in his voice, with his mouth, in the specific context of my body being taken apart by a man who had learned to take by being given.

His mouth closed over me and the world reduced to sensation.

Not the frantic, desperate sensation of the early days. This was the refined version — a year of learning, of cataloging, of building a comprehensive understanding of exactly which rhythm and which pressure and which angle of his tongue would produce which specific response. He had studied me the way he studied case law: exhaustively, obsessively, with the intention of mastery.

He had achieved mastery.

My hands found his hair. The sandy brown strands, unstyled, falling across his forehead the way they did in the morning. I gripped — not directing, holding on. Needing something to anchor me while his mouth did things that were methodical and devastating and that proved, conclusively, that the most dangerous version of Easton Mercer was not the attorney or the son or the man in the Tom Ford but the lover who approached pleasure with the same meticulous attention he brought to everything and who was, therefore, impossibly good at it.

"Easton — I’m going to—"

He pulled off. Looked up at me with those green eyes — dark now, the pupils blown, the candlelight catching the wet shine of his mouth. The expression on his face was one I’d never seen before: powerful, tender, predatory, kind. All four simultaneously. The full range.

"Not yet," he said.

My words. My exact words, from a dozen nights, from the specific context of edging him until he begged. Returned to me now with the precision of a man who remembered everything and deployed his memory strategically.

"You’re enjoying this," I said, and my voice was wrecked.

"I’m enjoying you." He moved up my body. Straddled my hips. The position — him above, me below, the complete inversion of our usual geometry — sent a cascade of sensation through me that was part physical and part psychological. The vulnerability of being on my back. The weight of him on my hips. The realization that I was, for the first time in our history, not in control.

It was terrifying. It was exhilarating. It was the thing I hadn’t known I needed until the man who knew me better than anyone recognized the need and met it.

He reached for the nightstand. Found what he needed — prepared, because Easton Mercer prepared for everything, including the choreography of a sexual encounter he’d been planning for God knew how long. The attorney who prepared his closing arguments a week in advance had, apparently, prepared this too.

He prepared himself. Slowly, his eyes on mine, the expression on his face shifting through stages of concentration and pleasure and the particular intensity of a man doing something intimate while maintaining eye contact, which required a level of vulnerability that the Easton of a year ago could not have imagined and that the Easton of tonight executed with the casual bravery of a man who’d learned that being seen was not a threat but a gift.

"Watch me," he said. My words. Again. Given back.

I watched. I watched his face change as his body opened. I watched his breath catch and his lips part and his eyes go glassy with the particular overwhelm of a sensation that was both preparation and preview. I watched the man I loved take control of his own pleasure with the same authority he brought to courtrooms and conference rooms and every space he’d ever occupied, and I understood — with the clarity of a man being taught something he thought he already knew — that Easton Mercer’s power was not something I’d given him. It was something he’d always had. I’d just helped him find the room where he’d locked it.

He sank onto me.

The sound we both made was the same sound we’d made the first time — a low, broken, incredulous exhalation, the frequency of two people discovering a resonance that shouldn’t exist and does. But this time the sound came from a different place. Not desperation. Not relief. Recognition. The sound of two bodies that knew each other completely finding a new configuration and discovering that the fit was the same. That the connection was not dependent on position or posture or who was holding whom. That the thing between us was structural. Load-bearing. Built into the foundation.

He moved.

Slowly at first — finding the rhythm, adjusting the angle, his hands on my chest for balance. His face was concentrated, focused, the expression of a man solving a problem in real time and enjoying the solution. Then the rhythm found itself, and his body took over from his brain, and the concentration dissolved into something more primal — the rolling of his hips, the arch of his spine, the way his head fell back and his mouth opened and the sounds he made were not controlled or performed or managed but free.

I gripped his hips. Not to direct — to hold. To feel the movement of his body under my hands, the muscles working, the bones shifting, the living architecture of a man in motion. My thumbs pressed into the hollows above his hip bones — the spots I’d mapped on the first night, the spots that made him gasp, that still made him gasp, that would always make him gasp because some responses were not learned but inherent, wired into the particular circuitry of a body I’d spent a year studying and would spend a lifetime continuing to study.

"I love you," I said. Not because the moment required it. Because the words were a pressure I could no longer contain — a year of mornings and evenings and midnights and the daily accumulation of a shared life compressed into three words that were inadequate and essential and that I said not as a declaration but as a release. "I love you. I love you."

The repetition broke him open. His rhythm stuttered. His eyes found mine — green and bright and streaming, the tears that were not sadness but overflow — and he said, "I know. I know. I love you. I—"

He came. The arch of his body — his spine curving back, his face tilted toward the skylight, the stars visible through the glass above him — was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. He cried out with his body suspended between my hips and the sky, and the sound filled the loft and bounced off the brick and the steel and the glass and became part of the building, absorbed into the walls of a home that had been constructed to hold exactly this.

I followed. Not on command — on instinct. The sight of him, the sound of him, the unbearable intimacy of being underneath someone you love while they shatter above you, pulled me over the edge with a force that bent my spine off the mattress and pressed my face into his chest and tore a sound from my throat that was his name and nothing else.

We collapsed. His weight on me. Heavy, grounding, the particular gravity of a body that had just experienced something seismic and needed a surface to land on. I held him. Arms around his back, hands spread across his shoulder blades, feeling the rapid percussion of his heart against my chest.

"That was—" he started.

"Yeah."

"I want to do that again."

"Give me ten minutes."

"Five."

"You’re going to kill me."

"Objection. Speculation."

I laughed. He laughed. The sound of two men laughing in a bed under a skylight while their bodies cooled and the candles burned lower and the record reached the end of Side A and the needle tracked the silence groove with a soft, repeating shh, shh, shh that sounded like the ocean and like breathing and like the particular quiet of a home at night when everyone in it is exactly where they’re supposed to be.

Later. The candles burned to stubs. The skylight showing constellations I couldn’t name and he could — Easton had downloaded a star map app three months ago and now narrated the sky on clear nights with the same earnest authority he brought to legal citations, which I found unspeakably endearing and would never tell him.

We lay tangled. His head on my chest. The default position. The place where his ear found my heartbeat and his hand rested on my sternum and the world reduced to the two of us and the things we said in the dark.

"Miguel Reyes is starting college in the fall," he said.

"Yeah?"

"Pre-law. He wants to practice civil rights litigation." A pause. "I’m writing his recommendation letter."

My hand moved in his hair. The slow, absent rhythm. "He’s going to be brilliant."

"He already is. He just needed someone to tell him."

I pressed my lips to his hair. Said nothing. The parallel was there — a man who’d needed someone to tell him he was worth something, and who was now telling someone else. The cycle completing. The thing built from wreckage becoming the foundation for the next thing.

"Torch has been wearing cologne," I said.

"I’ve noticed. I was afraid to mention it."

"The club is terrified. Rigs started a betting pool on who it is. Current frontrunner is the ER nurse who stitched him up after the bar fight last month."

"The one who called him — what was it—"

"’A walking fire hazard with the self-preservation instincts of a lemming.’ Yeah. That one."

"I like her already."

"Torch hasn’t stopped talking about her. Which, for Torch, means he mentioned her once without being asked."

Easton laughed. The vibration against my chest. The sound that was mine, that I’d earned, that existed because a man had been given permission to be happy and had taken it.

"My father texted this morning," he said.

The words arrived without weight. Not because they were weightless — because Easton had learned, over twelve months of careful, imperfect, ongoing negotiation with Gerald Mercer, to carry the weight differently. Not in his jaw. Not in his shoulders. In his hands, where he could examine it and set it down.

"What did he say?"

"’Thinking of you today.’" Easton pulled his phone from the nightstand. Showed me the screen. Four words. No signature. The most emotionally articulate message Gerald Mercer had ever produced — four words that represented, for a man whose emotional vocabulary had been amputated decades ago, a significant and effortful expansion.

I looked at the text. I tightened my arm around him. I said nothing, because nothing was the right response — the holding was the response, the arm was the response, the continued, daily, unremarkable fact of being here was the response to a father who was learning, at sixty-three, that love was a verb that required practice.

"It’s enough," Easton said quietly. "For now, it’s enough."

"Yeah," I said. "For now."

We lay there. The harbor breathed outside the windows. Objection snored at the foot of the bed — she’d returned from her exile on the couch approximately nine minutes after the sounds from the loft had ceased, her timing impeccable, her discretion nonexistent.

"Saturday," Easton said. "Shovelhead. Ruby’s. Pancakes."

"Every Saturday."

"Every Saturday."

The repetition was a vow. Not the kind spoken at altars — the kind spoken in beds, in the dark, between two people who’d survived a year and were now looking at the next one with the particular blend of terror and excitement that accompanies any life being lived honestly.

"Still mine?" I asked. The daily question. The ritual I’d started on the first morning in the warehouse and that had become, over three hundred and sixty-five mornings, the foundation of every day. Not asked from insecurity. Asked from reverence. The daily confirmation that the miracle was still here.

He tilted his face up. Green eyes, candlelit, the stars reflected in them through the skylight. The face of a man who’d spent twenty-nine years performing someone else’s life and one year living his own and who would, tomorrow, and the day after, and every day after that, choose the life he’d built from wreckage and chrome and the stubborn refusal to stay in a coffin.

"Sustained," he said. "Always."

I kissed his forehead. The small kiss. The one that meant everything.

The candles went out. The stars stayed.

And the morning — when it came, when the skylight let in the sun and found his face and woke him the way I’d designed it to — would be ours.

The way every morning was ours.

The way every morning would be.

Always.

Thank you for reading! Want to stay in Easton and Cade’s world? Book Two in the Iron Saints MC series — Burn Pattern, featuring Torch and his mouthy ER nurse — is coming soon.

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